Sunday, January 20, 2013

Why You'll Dig it:

How is it that a company that’s been in
business for nearly two and half decades
and now makes some of the fastest consumer
SSDs manages to fly under the radar of so
many power users? Those of you already familiar
with Other World Computing (aka
OWC) already know the answer.

See, OWC, which is headquartered in
Woodstock (Illinois, that is, not that Woodstock)
is one of the leading online Mac retailers.
In fact, OWC’s URL is www.mac
sales.com. Mac fanatics know that OWC
is a veritable one-stop shop for all things
Mac—software, accessories, component upgrades,
etc. That said, even the PC faithful
owe it to themselves to get acquainted with
OWC; as we mentioned, OWC has an impressive
line of solid-state drives. The Mercury
EXTREME Pro 6G just happens to be
one of the fastest SSDs we’ve ever tested.

The cheetah’s out of the bag, as it were,
but let’s take a closer look at what makes this
animal so wickedly fast. SandForce’s SF-2200
controller, which needs no introduction at
this point, is the Hemi under the Mercury
EXTREME Pro 6G’s hood. The SF-2200 is
the controller of choice for the vast majority
of today’s cutting-edge enthusiast SSDs, so
we’re not terribly surprised to see it here. The
Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G is also outfitted
with synchronous NAND flash, which gives
it a nice boost when you’re dealing with data
that’s already compressed.

The Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G’s performance
alone makes it a legitimate contender,
but OWC has a few more tricks up
its sleeve. For starters, OWC lets you take
this SSD for a 30-day spin around your
own personal test track, and if you don’t
like it, OWC will take it back and give you
a full refund. Because we can’t imagine a
sane person actually returning this drive,
what type of warranty are we looking at,
OWC? What’s that you say, five years?
Why, thank you—you really are too kind.

In a ridiculously crowded, unbelievably
competitive SSD market, OWC stands
out as one of the leaders. Keep a close eye
on this company. We’re guessing the bestkept
secret in solid-state storage won’t be a
secret much longer.